Reconstruction

Reconstruction was a period of United States history lasting from 9 May 1865 to 31 March 1877, when the liberal US Republican Party under President Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Rutherford B. Hayes transformed the status and society of the American South after the end of the American Civil War. Reconstruction began as US Army troops were dispatched to occupy the South, dividing it into military districts; Johnson decided that Tennessee was not to be occupied, as it was his home state. Johnson opposed the enfranchisement of newly-freed African-Americans and pursued a moderate approach to Reconstruction, while the Radical Republicans argued for civil rights and imposing harsh terms on the South. Northern "Carpetbaggers" came to the South to seek new jobs, and some southern politicians known as "Scalawags" changed their allegiance from the Southern Democrats to the Republicans in order to take part in the new government. The white southerners hated the northerners, Republicans, and freedmen, and some Confederate States Army veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan as a secret society that murdered blacks, Republicans, and their supporters. In 1871, President Grant passed several laws that crushed the KKK, authorizing the use of force to drive them underground. However, violence continued due to the activities of the Southern Red Shirts, who intimidated voters at elections and caused riots in South Carolina in 1876 and 1878. Reconstruction came to an end under President Hayes, who ordered the withdrawal of all US forces from the South in 1877. The South was reintegrated into the union, but its society would remain segregated and racist until the 1960s under the Southern Democrats' "Solid South".